Nine-year-old Samkelo Mthethwa is the youngest patient in KZN to receive a life-saving heart transplant.
|||Durban - A nine-year-old KwaMashu boy has just made medical history by becoming the youngest patient in KwaZulu-Natal to receive a life-saving heart transplant.
Samkelo Mthethwa’s new heart is “beating beautifully and he is rushing around like a normal child”, his cardiologist Dr David Gillmer, said on Thursday at the Ethekwini Hospital and Heart Centre, where the transplant was performed.
And it was a unique operation, too, as getting a new heart for such a young patient is rare.
“Hearts are difficult to get at the best of times, and finding a heart that is suitable for a child is even less frequent,” Gillmer said.
Fortunately for Samkelo, everything – including the donor heart – matched perfectly to give him a new lease of life.
The boy suddenly became ill a year ago, recalled his grandmother Evangeline Maphumulo, who has raised Samkelo since he was three months old.
“He was vomiting, had a temperature, wasn’t eating and was losing weight,” she said.
She took him to King Edward VIII Hospital, where doctors told her that he had a heart problem and suggested that he might need a transplant. They referred Samkelo to the Heart Centre.
Samkelo was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy – a diseased heart muscle – and he was constantly in and out of hospital with heart failure. He was short of breath, his liver was swollen as a result of his condition, and he was in a lot of pain. “He had no quality of life,” said Gillmer.
Although Samkelo was getting all the treatment he needed, it was clear that time was running out for him. His chances of surviving without a transplant were zero, Gillmer said.
Gillmer and Dr Robbie Kleinloog, the cardiothoracic surgeon who performed the heart transplant, praised Samkelo’s “amazing” grandmother, a retired nurse, for “watching him like a hawk”.
Then, at the end of last month, the word came that a donor heart had become available.
The parents of a 10-year-old boy, who was involved in a fatal head-on car crash in Pretoria, had generously decided to donate his organs.
“The unnamed accident victim was exactly the same height as Samkelo, the heart was the same size and he was the same blood group – something that almost never happens,” said Kleinloog.
Luckily for Samkelo, Kleinloog, who should have been in England attending a conference, was still in Durban that day because his visa had been delayed.
“It was fortuitous as I should have been on a flight the same night,” Kleinloog said.
But the heart was in Pretoria and had to be transplanted and beating in Samkelo’s body within four hours of being harvested.
Once again, Samkelo was in luck.
Just a week earlier, a local man, John Moffatt, a drilling and blasting contractor, whose teenage son had received a heart transplant almost 11 years ago, had bought a small plane, telling Kleinloog – who had performed his son’s operation – that it would always be available to transport donor organs.
The fixed-wing Beechjet, which is based in Pretoria, was flown to Durban to collect Kleinloog, as well as an assistant surgeon and two nurses, and they returned to the city to harvest the donor heart.
Meanwhile, Samkelo’s grandmother had been called to get to the hospital, where she was allowed to wheel him into the theatre and hold his hand while he received the anaesthetic.
Almost three hours later, she got the news she had been praying for: the transplant was a success.
“It was a very emotional experience. I wanted to cry,” she said.
That was almost a month ago and Samkelo will probably be discharged from hospital this weekend.
He is “eating like a horse” and has put on weight, his grandmother said.
He will have to be on three types of medication for the rest of his life.
Samkelo has missed a year of schooling, but will be back at Zamokuhle Primary School in January.
How was he feeling now? “I am much better,” he grinned.
Samkelo has found a place in the hearts of the nurses, who held a collection and presented him with a bicycle on Thursday.
His grandmother said she could not adequately thank the parents who had donated their son’s heart so that Samkelo could live.
“I will be writing to them to tell them how much I appreciate their sacrifice, said Maphumulo.
“They have done the most noble thing.”
Daily News